IE8 Issue?

[rlshepard]

Hi, I'm running Scalix 11.4.3 With pretty good success... I have started expanding my test group and I am now including some users in Europe. they use IE8 They initially logged in fine but now when they go to the SWA they just get loading please wait before they are even prompted to log in. using firefox works fine from the same machine. anybody have an suggestions?

off Topic: anyone know where I can get a Dutch localization for both SWA and Outlook connector?

[les]

Hi, I'm running Scalix 11.4.3 With pretty good success... I have started expanding my test group and I am now including some users in Europe. they use IE8 They initially logged in fine but now when they go to the SWA they just get loading please wait before they are even prompted to log in. using firefox works fine from the same machine. anybody have an suggestions?

Hi,

a recent topic with a similar issue found that it may be to do with a localised theme. Has SWA been themed up? If so try going back to standard.

Also, have you tried running in IE8's compatibility mode (aka IE7 mode)? Does it work from Firefox/ IE7?

[florian]

I must admit that I'm not a frequent user of IE, but the test Windows machine I have sitting on my desk has been upgraded to IE8 the day it went final and so far I haven't seen any specific issues with it; on the contrary, it is noticeably faster than IE7.

Have you turned on any additional browsing safety features and/or are using any plugins?

Florian.

[rlshepard]

I must admit that I'm not a frequent user of IE, but the test Windows machine I have sitting on my desk has been upgraded to IE8 the day it went final and so far I haven't seen any specific issues with it; on the contrary, it is noticeably faster than IE7.

Have you turned on any additional browsing safety features and/or are using any plugins?

Florian.

Well I don't use IE8 all that much either, it doesn't seem to run so well on ubuntu I have set up a VM running XP and vanilla IE8 and have no problems accessing the SWA. My IE8 user is in The Netherlands and seems to lack the technical vocabulary necessary to communicate what is happening. the latest is that he "Tweeked some settings" and got it working unfortunately I don't seem to beable to get more detail than that I hate no knowing....

[criptus]

One of my user (the last one who used IE for Scalix SWA) issued strange problem too.

Some messages (few %) did not show message content, some messages were not shown at all.

After using FF she had no problems any more.

[tonysu]

Just updated a workstation to use IE8, pointing to Scalix 11.4.5 running on OpenSuSE 11.1.

Curiously, although is definitely 11.4.5 which was just released a few days ago, "About..." in SWA indicates

Version 11.4.4.12082
Platform 11.4.4.2575
Server Version 11.4.4.1286

Is probably a minor bug, my guess is that Dev assumed a version 11.4.4.x would be released...

But, regarding IE8...
Scalix is using the "default theme" and I'm seeing the error popup described in the OP. Clicking through results in SWA loading to the point it starts to try to read the mailbox but is then frozen.

Solution appears to be when the login page displays and before submitting credentials, set the browser to run in "Compatibility Mode" by clicking on the torn page icon just to the right of the address bar.

The implication is that SWA is utilizing code which is being phased out, time for an update in HTML methods.

[florian]

this looks like a tomcat cache issue. shutdown tomcat, clear out webapps, work, tmp subdirectories (completely, including subdirs, but leave the main directories there) and restart.

check rpm -qa | grep scalix to see all 11.4.5 version numbers. About surely cannot display an old version number and it's not something we have forgotten about.

Florian

[tonysu]

this looks like a tomcat cache issue. shutdown tomcat, clear out webapps, work, tmp subdirectories (completely, including subdirs, but leave the main directories there) and restart.

check rpm -qa | grep scalix to see all 11.4.5 version numbers. About surely cannot display an old version number and it's not something we have forgotten about.

Florian

Just curious what might lead to suspect that this is a Server Side caching issue?

Seems to me that if that if Scalix is serving the same web content (code) regardless of browser (I'm assuming your code doesn't serve custom code by first identifying the browser), then I doubt that changing IE8 to run in Compatibility Mode instead of Standards Mode should have made a difference.

(BTW - As I'm typing this message I discovered that this input box is also subject to the same issue, the box won't scroll unless IE8 is in Compatibility Mode)

Since my post I did some reading on this IE8 "Standards Mode vs Compatibilty Mode" - Apparently practically all current web content has been created on a de facto "IE standard" likely based on the pure market penetration of the browser but never ratified by any Web Standards body. Over the past few years such Web Standards have been established which should support greater browser interoperability, but deprecates a number of IE6(and earlier) practices. So now ironically IE8 is leading the move away from the "proprietary" IE de facto practices/unofficial standards everybody has been using... The bottom line is that "Standards" does not mean IE7 and earlier compatible which practically the rest of the world(including FF) is still doing... "Standards" means significant change to something that is supposed to ultimately work better and be more interoperable.

From the articles i read, this generally means some major code review by all coders... To ensure compliance with the new "Standards." If problems still exist then the problems are then likely in the components being used (eg Java Beans) which will themselves need to be updated.

As for the versioning, I downloaded the binary only Friday (two days ago) and I'm sure all the way through the installation 11.4.5 was displayed. Even the initial logon page displays 11.4.5.

[florian]

Well, I didn't verify the issue reported because your statement that your About box is displaying 11.4.4 version numbers. Mine doesn't, I get

Version 11.4.5.12178
Platform Version 11.4.5.2663
Server Version 11.4.5.13150

(This may be slightly different from 11.4.5-GA, because we test further advanced stuff internally!)

I am very sure that a 11.4.5 version of SWA cannot display any 11.4.4 version strings; this is not set by some developer, but rather by our build system. That means that if your browser is displaying this, you either haven't upgraded the scalix-swa RPM to 11.4.5 or something is caching the old stuff and not serving the new JavaScript files. That something can be either Tomcat (and we've seen cases where this happened and it was resolved by clearing out the said files) or the browser, in which case the cache should be cleared.

As long as the version number display is not consistent between the installed RPM number and the About box, we shouldn't even start looking into anything else, because for whatever reason you are running inconsistent code.

Florian

[tonysu]

Agreed,
Repeating that at least in my case is the OpenSuSE 11 binary package.
I wonder if the wrong binaries might be included in that package.
BTW - Mobile client is also reporting 11.4.x

[florian]

nope. packages have been thoroughly and fully QA tested. suse110 tarball contains

[ ] scalix-swa-11.4.5.12163-1.noarch.rpm 28-Jul-2009 08:06 11M

have you checked "rpm -qa" output?

have you tested clearing the Tomcat cache directories and browser cache as proposed?

The fact that multiple web apps are affected further supports the theory that either the upgrade hasn't worked or that Tomcat cache has not been cleared.

Tx,
Florian.

[tonysu]

Not sure what really happened, I determined that some kind of failover to backup happened returning the install to an earlier version.

In any case, after re-installing on OpenSuSE 11.0 it looks like versions are reported correctly.

And, just for kicks I also turned off IE8 compatibility mode... with success.

So, maybe when Scalix v11.4.5 is installed, the problem is resolved. Maybe. At least in my case that seems to have happened.

[florian]

I start taking minor offense here.

While errors can happen, there is generally no "maybe" in software development. We do a lot of QA work, testing and else. And 11.4.5 has been tested with IE8, while scalix releases before that haven't, so it's no surprise to me that things work fine, cause that's what we state and believe. Again, don't beat me up for this statement if we have missed anything, but we've been trying.

Tx,
Florian.